Beyond merchandising: the PXM personas that get underestimated

2 days ago

3 min read

Bring your sales and support teams into your PXM projects

Abstract illustration of a Product Experience Management (PXM) data hub connecting to sales and customer support personas.

When a PXM project kicks off, most organizations naturally focus on the personas most affected by the product experience: merchandising teams, buyers, ecommerce and marketplace teams, and above all the end customer. It's only natural: these are your primary users, who either work with the information or consume it.

Yet limiting your governance and adoption strategy to these "usual suspects" is a missed opportunity to maximize the return on investment (ROI) of your platform. Two other strategic profiles too often get overlooked: sales teams and support teams.

1. The sales team: using product data as an engagement lever

Whether on the field, at events and roadshows or, in B2B, meeting your customers, sales teams need access to complete, structured and reliable product information. Static sheets (PDFs, paper catalogs) can be incomplete, missing data, … and slow down sales cycles.

Your website is a good source, but it isn't always enough: some information must remain internal, some is complementary and useful in a specific context, and some products simply aren't available yet (new season, product in development, etc.).

To address this, the leading platforms on the market offer features designed for these use cases:

Akeneo – Digital Showroom: provides an immersive, dynamic space to present your assortment in a visual and engaging way at events or B2B presentations.
inriver – Brand Store: easily create personalized digital brand showcases to deliver rich content to partners and sales teams.
Salsify – Catalog Site: publish interactive, always up-to-date digital catalogs for buyers and sales reps in just a few clicks.

It's also possible to build them into your processes, but most importantly, your sales team should focus its effort on its customers, not on hunting down information about the products it promotes.

2. The support team: ensuring a smooth customer experience after the sale

The product experience doesn't end once the order is placed. When a customer contacts customer service with a technical question, a part's compatibility or a warranty document related to their purchase, support needs instant access to the centralized source of truth.

Even if this information should be available on your website, or AI agents can easily provide it (finding a compatible part, retrieving a user guide for a procedure), after-sales support also needs fast access to it, and above all access to the right information.

By bringing technical support and customer service into the PXM ecosystem, you give them reliable information and dedicated documentation. The external tools they already use every day can be integrated, so they can access the details without leaving their usual environment. The result: shorter average ticket resolution times, higher customer satisfaction and fewer unofficial Excel files circulating internally.

It's even possible to add a feedback loop: customer comments captured by support (missing information, incorrect information, etc.) flow back to the teams who manage the content.

Business impact and implementation tips

To successfully extend your PIM/PXM to sales and support teams:

Involve them from the discovery and requirements phase: identify their specific user journeys and the critical data they need day to day.
Align platform features with business objectives: make full use of your platform's native modules, or plan the integration with the systems you already have in place.
Measure adoption: track actual usage by these new personas to adjust access, information and their experience.

Want to extend the adoption of your PIM / PXM tools beyond your traditional teams?